MESI Cache Coherence Simulator for Teaching Purposes

Abstract

Nowadays, the computational systems (multi and uniprocessors) need to avoid the cache coherence problem. There are some techniques to solve this problem. The MESI cache coherence protocol is one of them. This paper presents a simulator of the MESI protocol which is used for teaching the cache memory coherence on the computer systems with hierarchical memory system and for explaining the process of the cache memory location in multilevel cache memory systems. The paper shows a description of the course in which the simulator is used, a short explanation about the MESI protocol and how the simulator works. Then, some experimental results in a real teaching environment are described.